Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive. A Mother’s Shameful Secret. The Power to Forgive.
The inspirational true story of one man overcoming enormous odds – including sexual abuse from his alcoholic mother – to choose his own path in life and become a truly exceptional human being.From the age of four David Thomas was sexually abused by his alcoholic mother and subsequently physically abused by his aged stepfather. By the age of 16 he had committed multiple burglaries, assaulted a police officer with an iron bar, attempted suicide, received a criminal conviction from a juvenile court, and been expelled from school.He left home as soon as he could and joined the fire service at 20. At the age of 27 he bought a book on memory. Within 8 months he had come fourth in the World Memory Championships and went on to develop one of the most powerful memories in history, even breaking an 18-year-old Guinness Book of Records memory record by reciting the mathematical formula Pi (3.1459) to 22,500 digits from memory.In 1999 he was reunited with his mother after 4 years apart but tragically, a year later he found her dead at home after she had died of an alcohol induced heart attack.David's shocking and moving story is one of abuse, alcoholism, courage, determination, forgiveness, love and how everyone can choose their own path through life irrespective of their upbringing, background or perceptions about what they think is possible. David is an incredible example of how this can happen.
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To my children Molly, Nathan, and Danielle who have shown me the greatest pleasure of all is being a parent
Contents
Chapter One: Living In The Shadows
Chapter Three: A Man Called Reg
Chapter Four: Smashing The Dream
Chapter Eleven: Master Criminal
Chapter Twelve: On The Scrapheap
Part 3: Another Kind Of Memory
Chapter Thirteen: Into The Fire
Chapter Fourteen: Heartbreaker
Chapter Fifteen: Down Memory Lane
I know she has been drinking again. I can hear her crashing around upstairs and then, suddenly, she’s in the kitchen. She can barely stand as she staggers through the door and gropes her way along the grubby kitchen cabinets, trying to get to me across the room.
I’m playing with my bricks on the lino floor. She starts tottering towards me, falls over, and then tries to lie down next to me. She is completely naked, her eyes glazed and unfocused as she emits a low drunken moan.
‘David,’ she says, her voice alternating between an inaudible moan and a loud drunken shout, ‘come over here.’
She doesn’t seem to realize that I am already close beside her. When she tells me to do something I always do it at once. I love to please her and I hate to displease her. If I don’t do as I’m told she may stop loving me. She won’t smack me or hurt me, but I think she will be angry. So I stand up and then sit down again, so that she can see that I am there, next to her.
When she sees me near her, she looks up and pulls me down towards her. She then takes my hand and places it between her legs, which are spread wide open. It feels strange and I don’t understand why she’s doing this. She rubs my hand up and down between her legs and starts to moan again. She is sighing and keeps moving my hand inside her and then – I don’t know why or how – I start to realize that the loud moaning noises are not, as I first thought, signs of distress but of pleasure.
As this dawns on me, and because she continues to moan, I take it that this game is good and so I’m happy to continue to do it as long as she wants to. She carries on rubbing herself with my hand for some time until she has had enough.
Then she pushes my hand away and without saying a word, my mother picks up her bottle and staggers back across the kitchen to make her way upstairs, while I go back to playing with my bricks on the lino floor.
Most of the time you’re the best Mummy in the whole world. But then you change. You get angry and make me do things I don’t understand. Why do you want me to do those things? Please tell me why. Why can’t you make my dark Mummy go away? I’m afraid of her. Don’t you see what she does? Don’t you see what she makes me do? Why do you pretend you don’t know?
I am only five but I’ve already got so many questions I can feel them pressing on my heart. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. There aren’t any answers, just more questions. I don’t know if I will ever have the answers. All I know is that my questions are piling up inside me. I try to bury them but there are too many. I feel like an unexploded mine.
* * *
The house in which I am born, on 6 April 1968, is in an idyllic setting: the small rural village of Calder Bridge, near Halifax in West Yorkshire. The village is picture-postcard perfect with beautiful cottages made from Yorkshire stone, a small village pub and post office, all wrapped up in the incredible rolling landscape of the Pennine Hills. I love the glorious countryside feel to it – the large wide-open spaces, the rolling fields, the luscious woodland, the sense of freedom. Even aged three or four, my mother lets me wander through the woods to play with other kids. Everyone knows everyone else and there’s a real sense of community.
Our house is quite isolated though. It stands in a fork in a country lane and is one of four terraced charcoal-grey-stone cottages, smothered at each end with dark-green ivy, surrounded by trees and perched above a steep ravine through which a sparkling river runs over mossy rocks and boulders. Although from the front of the building the cottages seem squat, with small, poky rooms where the light never spreads, the back of the building slopes steeply down towards the ravine. So there are only two floors on the front of the house, but two more floors at the back. They tower over the river, and even in summer the whole building is gloomy and mysterious like a gothic mansion.
My earliest memories are of these strange contrasts – the warm, cosy, intimate times when I play with my mother; the cold, isolated, dark, forbidding times when things are completely different – in my family life as well as in the places surrounding it.
